As noted on Wikipedia, the Internet or Internet cloud is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet is composed primarily of HTML documents transmitted from web servers to web browsers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). However, HTTP is used to serve images, sound, and other content, in addition to HTML. To allow the Web browser to know how to handle each document it receives, other information is transmitted along with the document. This meta data usually includes the MIME type (e.g. text/html or application/xhtml+xml) and the character encoding.
The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visual or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page. The HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML web pages.
The primary function of a web server is to deliver web pages on request to clients. This means delivery of HTML documents and any additional content that may be included by a document, such as images, style sheets and JavaScripts. A client, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiates communication by making a request for a specific resource using HTTP and the server responds with the content of that resource or an error message if unable to do so. The resource is typically a real file on the server's secondary memory, but this is not necessarily the case and depends on how the web server is implemented.
Internet traffic consumes a significant percentage of the existing communication channels around the world. In many cases, copies of the same Internet content are being sent thousands of times in a single second. Each of these transmissions across the Internet uses a communication channel and fills the channel with unnecessary and redundant data.
One of the most common ways to access the Internet is via a terrestrial, high-capacity connection. However, terrestrial connections are limited in geographical coverage and performance. Terrestrial connections are also inconsistent in quality, even in some of the most developed countries like the United States and Japan. In emerging markets, Internet access is even more difficult. Often, local Internet exchanges are not available, and web pages or corporate data centers are hosted in different continents. As a result, WAN use severely limits Internet performance. By contrast, satellite connectivity is unlimited in geographical coverage.